Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence

1. Business reporting is an essential part of the BI movement toward improving managerial decision making

   • Business Report: Communication artifact prepared with the specific intention of relaying information in a presentable form.
     • Has dashboards and visual analytics
     • Reports can fulfill many different functions, for example: To ensure that all departments are functioning properly, to provide information, to provide results of an analysis, to persuade others to act, to create an organizational memory.
   • Business reporting and business performance (BPM) are both enablers of BI and analytics.
     • BPM: Is an integrated set of processes, methodologies, metrics, and applications designed to drive the overall financial and operational performance of an enterprise.
       • Closed-Loop BPM Cycle: Strategize, Plan, Monitor/analyze and Act/adjust.
   • Creation of these reports involves ETL procedures in coordination with a data warehouse and then using one or more reporting tools.
   • Components of business reporting: OLTP, Data Supply, ETL, Data Storage, Business Logic, Publication and Assurance

2. Data Visualization: "The use of visual representations to explore, make sense of, and communicate data" (Few,2008).

   • Types of visual elements used to create scorecards and dashboards.

3. Basic charts and graphs that are used for information visualization:

   • Line Chart, Bar Chart, Pie Chart, Scatter Plot, Bubble Chart, Specialized Charts and Graphs, Histogram, Gantt chart, PERT chart, Geographic Map, Bullet, Heat Map, Highlight Table, Tree Map.

4. Most of the activity in the BI platform market is from organizations that are trying to mature their visualization capabilities and to move from descriptive to diagnostic analytics.

   • Data discovery/visualization vendors such as Tableau, received more positive feedback than vendors offering OLAP cube.
     • This emphasis on data from most of the leaders in the market which are now promoting tools with business-user-friendly data integration.

5. Visual Analytics: Combination of visualization and predictive analytics.

   • Is aimed at answering "why is happening" "what is more likely to happen", and is usually associated with business analytics.
     • SAS Institute, is approaching it from another direction.
       • Key benefits proposed by SAS analytics: Empower all users with data exploration techniques, answer complex questions faster, improve information sharing and collaboration, liberate IT and provide room to grow at a self-determined pace.

6. Differences between dashboard and scorecard: Executives, managers, and staff use scorecards to monitor strategic alignment and success with strategic objectives and targets, BSC. Dashboards are used at the operational and tactical levels.

7. Data mining is a term used to describe discovering or mining knowledge from large amounts of data.

   • Is highly positioned at the intersection of many disciplines, including statistics, artificial intelligence, machine learning, management science, and more.
     • Simple Taxonomy for Data Mining Tasks: Classification, Clustering, Associations.
     • Data mining applications: Customer Relationship Management, Banking, Retailing and logistics, Manufacturing and production, brokerage and securities trading, insurance, travel industry,, medicine, and more.
     • Real-World Data: Data Consolidation, Data Cleaning, Data Transformation,Data Reduction, Well-Formed Data.